In the US we spend about half of our national budget on social programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, grants to build affordable housing, public education grants, the Veterans Administration (which mostly covers health care for veterans), and so on. We also spend a significant amount of money on agricultural subsidies of many kinds.
In contrast, we spend approximately 1% of our budget on all of NASA - including NASA's deep space exploration programs, it's earth sensing programs, and its manned spaceflight programs, in addition to the unsung work it does in aeronautics, which includes helping develop more efficient passenger planes and safer, more efficient air traffic control. Which means that we spend considerably less than 1% of the federal budget on deep space mission technologies like this one.
So I have a question for you in response to your question: if we can't solve world hunger by spending 50% of our national budget, why should I believe that we can solve it by spending 51%?
Can't we take just a little bit of our budget and spend it on something where we can make real technological progress, right now, and see where that leads us?
These kind of arguments have always struck me as similar to thinking that you can pay off your mortgage by cancelling your newspaper subscription. The math just doesn't work, and in the meantime you actively make yourself less educated.
NASA isn't tasked with food production or distribution, nor should they be. There are other departments for that.
You're shoving the responsibility for the starving masses on NASA and their relatively small budget - why not the military? How is their mission trying to solve the distribution issues? (It's not.) The Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier program cost $36 billion (cf. wikipedia), that's more than NASA's budget. Why spend that money there? There are more than enough ships right now.
If you cut their budget entirely, you would have hundreds of billions to spend. Or education, a group who are also not tasked with food distribution. Or Homeland Security, again not tasked with food distribution.
Why is NASA alone the target of your scorn?
What makes you think that, if NASA were folded right up, all the money would be transferred and the starving masses would be fed? They weren't being fed before NASA was created.
A good portion of the US don't feel that it's their problem to feed the masses, something that could be readily achieved if there was sufficient political will.
In contrast, we spend approximately 1% of our budget on all of NASA - including NASA's deep space exploration programs, it's earth sensing programs, and its manned spaceflight programs, in addition to the unsung work it does in aeronautics, which includes helping develop more efficient passenger planes and safer, more efficient air traffic control. Which means that we spend considerably less than 1% of the federal budget on deep space mission technologies like this one.
So I have a question for you in response to your question: if we can't solve world hunger by spending 50% of our national budget, why should I believe that we can solve it by spending 51%?
Can't we take just a little bit of our budget and spend it on something where we can make real technological progress, right now, and see where that leads us?
These kind of arguments have always struck me as similar to thinking that you can pay off your mortgage by cancelling your newspaper subscription. The math just doesn't work, and in the meantime you actively make yourself less educated.